A successful tweet is often measured by how often it’s retweeted, but Twitter’s data experts are focusing on a new statistic – impressions – that they argue better quantify impact. And they have found some exceptional numbers behind Mitt Romney and President Obama’s exchange over the Confederate battle flag.

When Mr. Romney posted his call on Twitter to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State House, reporters and pundits credited it with kick-starting the debate among Republicans and putting the issue at the forefront of the 2016 presidential campaign. But the retweets he received, over 45,000, were modest compared to the impact; Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential announcement tweet, for example, received more than 100,000 retweets.

Take down the #ConfederateFlag at the SC Capitol. To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred. Remove it now to honor #Charleston victims.

Enter impressions, which Twitter says essentially track any time a tweet manifests itself as pixels on a glowing screen. It could be viewed on Twitter’s desktop website, mobile website, on apps, or even when a Tweet is embedded on a news site like First Draft.

So when Mr. Obama quoted Mr. Romney’s tweet, saying “Good point, Mitt,” and followed up with two tweets of his own on the subject, the reach skyrocketed: more than 22.8 million impressions, according to data that Twitter provided to First Draft.

“What we’re experimenting with right now,” Nick Pacilio, a spokesman for Twitter, said on Tuesday, “is even if a tweet doesn’t have a lot of retweets, if it made news, the sort of thing that news outlets cited as a source of a story, then the amount of views it gets is huge.”

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